Party Hard- Yahoo introduces Y!OS
These Yahoo execs may bring the nerd into “revenge of the nerds,” but they sure have something to celebrate. Yahoo slammed into the Open Web last week with Open Hack 2008- bringing every strength of Open right to their home page. According to Cody Simms on this week’s episode of the The SocialWeb TV the shift came more as a declaration: “We are going to be open.”
Yahoo! Open Strategy is introducing applications to Yahoo (using OpenSocial) and using OAuth, to make social “a dimension.” Rather than making the case for the Open Strategy and asking users to give new, Open services a try, Yahoo-ers are getting a heavy dose of an Open Web on their home page. Why is this brilliant? Because for a user, this is a natural evolution of their homepage that easily lets them utilize different services in a familiar space.
Ok so maybe they won’t use any of the new opportunities that are going to EXPLODE when this rolls out- but my truth is this- when facebook introduced applications, I didn’t know where to find them or how to use them or even that they existed. But over time, they were there, in my space, where I could access them. And eventually, I did. For the millions of Yahoo users out there, this is a giant step forward in being able to freely explore the web, bringing Web 2.0 directly to the users. Yay!